School Reform, Russian Style

Late last September, as Russian troops and anti-reform hard-liners
faced off in the streets around the Russian White House, I found myself
in the safety and quiet of a Moscow school. The experience was symbolic
in a way. Struggling to build a fledgling democracy out of the ruins of
Communism, the Russian Federation teeters on the edge of anarchy. It
staggers under the weight of spiraling inflation, searing ethnic
strife, and fierce political infighting, sometimes bordering on civil
war. Russians have seen their social welfare system disintegrate,
subsidies disappear, and the very fabric of society come undone. Yet
through all of this--indeed, through revolutions, coups, and other
upheavals of the past--education has continued largely uninterrupted.
In the words of one Russian educator, "Today, the school is the only
structure that hasn't come apart, the only structure that works.''

I first walked into School 469 on Sept. 23, two days after
anti-reform lawmakers barricaded themselves in the White House. My
husband is a foreign service officer, and we'd been posted to the U.S.
Embassy in Moscow in the summer of 1992. As an education writer who had
chronicled U.S. schooling over the past decade, I wanted to see for
myself how schools were faring in the postCommunist era, how the
curricula, textbooks, and course offerings had changed.

Is it possible, I wondered, for a nation's teachers and its 20
million students to suddenly make a 180-degree turn from the rigid
dogma of Communism to the free flow of ideas and information that
characterizes democracy?

One of the best ways to answer that question, it seemed to me, would
be to spend some time talking with and observing a Russian teacher. I
figured my neighborhood school was as good a place as any to turn to.
So, at the start of the school year, I paid a visit to School 469, a
comprehensive secondary school in Moscow's Proletariat region that
enrolls students from 1st through 11th grade, the final year of high
school in Russia. My first stop was the office of Principal Tatyana
Vasilievna Kolnovalova. I told her I wanted to meet a typical teacher,
observe classes, and talk to students. She thought for a minute and
then described three of her 47 teachers who she felt were most
representative. I chose the one who had been teaching the longest--20
years.

Kolnovalova led me up several flights of stairs to Room 28, on the
fourth floor. Outside the classroom on the beige wall was a large
pen-and-ink drawing of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, along with
several lines of his poetry. Inside, Russian language and literature
teacher Svetlana Nikolaevna Gerasina was tidying up some papers on her
desk. Following introductions and explanations, she agreed to meet with
me and to let me observe her class over the next two weeks. We set our
first session for the following Monday.

After leaving Room 28, I wandered around the school, which was built
in 1936. More than 50 years of use had taken their toll in peeling
paint, chipped stairs, and sloping floors. The facility's 20 classrooms
were spacious, and many had been attractively appointed, but even
recent renovations couldn't hide structural disintegration.

Outside the four-story structure--one of 67,000 schools in
Russia--yellow and red leaves had fallen on the cracked cement of the
large playground. Swings hung without seats. Behind the pale yellow
building, a large garbage dump bulged with the odorous refuse from
neighboring high-rise apartment buildings. Beyond the schoolyard, the
city braced for political turmoil.

On Monday, Sept. 27, at 8:15 a.m., Gerasina greeted me at the door
of her classroom, where she has taught grammar and literature for 10
years. She ushered me into the room, leaving a noisy cluster of
students in the hallway, and chatted as she showed me the closet at the
back of the room where I could hang my coat. "I try to encourage
discussion and debate,'' she said, speaking to me in her native Russian
because she felt her English was weak. "Literature provides us with
moral issues and artistic material that we can use to learn more about
life.''

A few minutes later, a group of 8th graders pushed open the door.
Girls and boys dressed in jeans and skirts, sweaters and shirts took
their assigned seats, draped coats over the backs of chairs, pushed
book bags and backpacks under desks, and sat down. When Gerasina moved
to the front of the room, the children stood to acknowledge her,
something I have never seen in an American classroom. This simple show
of respect, surely a throwback to the more authoritarian Soviet era,
seemed almost refreshing, given the chaotic times. Gerasina told the
students to sit, asked if everyone was present, and then launched into
the first class of the week.

At the top of the agenda was a review of the material covered the
previous Friday, followed by the presentation of new material.
Gerasina's 22 students sat in pairs at tandem desks--girls with girls,
boys next to boys. Plants and dried flowers filled three big windows,
which were adorned with pale green curtains. Outside, a construction
drill droned.

Gerasina, dressed in brown striped pants and a brown sweater
highlighted with silver threads, called on individual students to
answer questions. Each child stood, resuming his or her seat only when
instructed to do so. The 13-year-olds did exercises on a brown
chalkboard at the front of the room, read from textbooks, and listened
to their teacher's comments on Russian grammar. Every so often,
Gerasina told them to jot down something significant in their
notebooks: "On a new line, write this,'' she advised. Throughout the
class, the teacher encouraged her students with smiles and praise. But
she also taunted individuals who answered incorrectly or who shifted
their gaze when questions came their way.

At the end of the class, the teacher assigned homework. "I try not
to give a lot,'' she told me later. "They have a lot to do, but they
also need to relax.'' When she dismissed the class, a number of
students stayed on, gathering around their teacher with questions and
comments.

Later, I asked Gerasina about how her teaching had changed from
previous years, when the central authorities prescribed lesson plans
that were carried out in every school across the vast Soviet Union. I
was particularly interested in her thoughts on recent reforms allowing
teachers greater control over the curricula, a considerable departure
from the universal curricula of the past. Enacted as part of Russia's
1992 Education Law--an effort to decentralize, personalize, and
overhaul schooling--the reforms were introduced into the classroom this
academic year.

"Before, there was a clear-cut curriculum,'' she explained. "Now,
with the democratization of society, as they call it, we've been given
a lot of options.'' The most obvious change is that teachers can now
design as much as 40 percent of a course's content, and they can create
their own "special courses,'' as Gerasina has with a weekly session on
young literary figures.

"I start thinking about what I can give the kids that they haven't
read before,'' said the 45-year-old teacher. "Writers who left after
the revolution, the first wave of immigrants, such as Nabokov, about
whom we never heard anything before, even in the university. I give
kids this kind of material, we talk about his works, about how he
differed from other writers who wrote in the same period. I choose
Solzhenitsyn, for example, among writers who wrote about the gulag;
that's my choice.''

She continued: "There was a time when we didn't talk about a lot of
things. Now we can use our own judgment. I now teach a lesson that is
significantly more interesting because of the talents of the writers I
most love. I can talk about these writers with more interest; there's
more emotion. Now, we simply feel more free, that is, we can talk in
class. I don't know how well we understand democracy, but now we can
freely discuss in classes events that go on in our country. Before, of
course, we couldn't do this.''

The opportunities these reforms present are perhaps all the more
significant to this teacher. Born in her grandmother's home in the
Lipetsk region of Russia to a schoolteacher and a military pilot,
Gerasina spent most of her youth attending military schools on closed
complexes in northern Russia, in places such as Murmansk and the Kola
Peninsula. Then, when she was in the 8th grade, her family moved to
Pushkin, which she described as a small, privileged area near Moscow
where the intelligentsia who didn't want to live in the capital city
resided. There, she said, she received a "good education.''

Gerasina recalled how she was always fascinated with the humanities
and "everything related to art.'' But she confided, "I didn't like the
literature lessons that were taught in our school--I was completely
indifferent to my literature teacher--but I was very interested in
reading on my own.''

Having the opportunity now to read authors that were banned in the
past allows teachers greater choice, she told me. "You can create
lessons that simply weren't possible before. There's a wider
possibility to teach creatively. There's also a wider representation of
the subject in school, and, as a result, education is better.''

Gerasina cautioned about the importance of keeping literature
separate from political issues. "Real literature,'' she said, "is not
politics but the resolution of different kinds of societal
problems--kindness, love, how to lead people, how people suffer.
Therefore, literature always provides us with enormous possibilities to
learn and grow, apart from politics. Literature is higher than politics
because it's art. Literature has to speak to those problems that help
people live.''

Although she lauded Russia's education reform efforts, Gerasina
stressed that their success is largely dependent on teachers. "I think
that there have always been good teachers and that there have always
been average teachers,'' she said. The kind of education a child gets,
she added, depends on the teacher he or she "ends up'' with. "If you
end up with a teacher with enough strength and experience, you'll get a
very good education. But if you end up with an average teacher, you'll
get a very average education. That's my strong conviction, that
education is dependent on the personality of the teacher.''

Gerasina also noted the difficulties inherent in teachers being
agents of change. "It is important for teachers to participate in
reforms,'' she said, "but teachers can't take part in reforming
education and teach. Most reform efforts don't come from inside the
schools but from the Ministry and the administrators because we are too
tired; our inertia is from physical exhaustion.'' I thought of the many
American educators I'd interviewed who, despite time-consuming
schedules, had moved to the forefront of reform, and I wondered whether
Gerasina's remarks were typical of most Russian teachers. Later, an
official at the Russian Education Ministry, reminding me that reform is
a new concept here, told me they were.

One commonly voiced criticism of the education reform movement in
Russia is that it has been focused almost exclusively on the humanities
and social sciences and has neglected the other disciplines. Principal
Kolnovalova, who came to School 469 as a physics teacher and still
teaches four hours a week, was one such critic. She told me she thought
that science curricula had suffered because of the inattention to the
technical subjects and exact sciences.

Still, the current focus on the humanities is not accidental. During
the Soviet era, schools focused heavily on mathematics and the
sciences, and the curricula in these subject areas were considered
strong. The humanities, on the other hand, were bogged down, if not
totally lost, in Communist ideology. The 1992 reform act sought to take
education beyond Marxist-Leninist thinking and "depoliticize'' it,
moving from what Education Minister Evgeny Tkachenko called "a
political paradigm'' to a "teaching paradigm,'' from a "totalitarian
society'' to a "civic society.''

To compensate for the shortage of humanities components in Russian
education and to encourage the development of critical-thinking skills,
reformers also called for the introduction of a new generation of
textbooks. Much of the work in this area has been carried out with the
financial support of the U.S.based Soros Foundation, which provided $10
million for Russian researchers and teachers to write more than 500 new
texts in the humanities fields; 200 of them were ready to distribute to
schools this year.

The foundation, created by billionaire George Soros, has also
pledged $250 million over five years to help Russia's Education
Ministry and its Committee on Higher Education further upgrade
humanities teaching. The "Transformation of the Humanities and Social
Sciences'' project will give grants to teachers and schools based on
nationwide competitions, test new methods of teaching subjects at
experimental sites across Russia, develop new ways to train teachers,
and establish a laboratory on humanities education that will, among
other things, develop an infrastructure to support ongoing reform.

Despite her country's current focus on the humanities, Gerasina
predicted that within 25 years, the sciences would regain their
traditionally high stature. "Without this return,'' she said, "the
country can't reach high levels of achievement.''

Gerasina believes that school reform and new societal freedoms will
ultimately spawn a generation of students who are more appreciative of
education. "Children will be able to choose their own courses,'' she
explained, "and the relations between teachers and students will be
better because kids will be more interested when they can make their
own choices.''

As I walked to School 469 two days later, snow swirled in the air.
(When I asked a student whether schools were ever closed because of
snow, she looked at me quizzically; clearly, bad weather was no more a
deterrent to schooling in Russia than political uprisings.) The
morning's class in Room 28 was again Russian grammar. As usual, the
students stood to greet their teacher, then resumed their seats. During
the lesson, the 8th graders took turns writing lines of poetry on the
chalkboard and reciting lines from their textbooks.

Trim and energetic, Gerasina walked up and down the aisles during
the class, affectionately ruffling students' hair and calling her
charges "my darlings'' and "my dears.'' Like teachers I'd observed in
the United States, she offered students chances to correct their
errors, asked them to point out classmates' incorrect responses, and
let individuals know when she was disappointed in their work. She was,
in turn, both cajoling and critical.

Later, Gerasina told me that she uses strong students to propel her
classes. "I always have partners in lessons to help me,'' she
explained. "If there are two or three kids who are leaders, that's
good. Weak students without leaders stay weak.'' Many of the
"leaders,'' she said, tend to be girls. "Our girls are quite bright and
very active in class, and our boys are less active. When they leave
school, they change places.''

Teaching "always depends on your estimation of the psychological
possibilities of the class,'' she said. "You strive to rouse them so
that they sit in class and rage--in the best sense of that word.'' Such
behavior was not encouraged when Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's picture hung
at the front of Room 28.

As the students worked, my eyes wandered over the classroom.
Pictures of 16 male literary figures-- Mayakovski, Tolstoy, Chekov,
Gogol, and other Russian greats--lined the wall above the chalkboard.
Hard- and soft-cover books perched on shelves at the back of the room,
available for use by students who don't have the currently assigned
book at home or can't find it in the library. An activity board sported
the headings "Russian Language Corner,'' "Learning to Learn,'' and
"Advice to Readers.'' A poster displaying information about literature
hung in the front of the room. There was also a television, which
Gerasina told me she uses on occasion to show educational videos. It
all seemed very familiar; I could have been sitting in an American
classroom.

After the grammar class, Gerasina turned to literature. Her task: to
teach a group of 8th graders to appreciate nuances in Russian writing.
As she started the lesson, she pulled her chair close to the first row
of students. "This,'' she told me later, "is more informal; it
encourages discussion.'' The students in this class acted differently
from those in previous ones, calling out answers without waiting to be
acknowledged, sitting as they spoke, and drawing closer to their
teacher as she discussed humor in the writings of Pushkin. An
experienced teacher who majored in language and literature at Moscow
State University-- the former U.S.S.R.'s premier educational
institution--Gerasina was familiar with her material and never referred
to notes.

Although the teaching load for the average Russian teacher is 18
hours a week, Gerasina spends 33 hours on the job; that includes her
six daily classes, the weekly after-school special course on young
literary figures, seminars, and consultation hours. Most days, she
works from 8:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. without a break. In addition, she
regularly takes her students to museums after school and, when she can
find tickets, to the theater in the evening. Then, of course, there is
the time she spends preparing at home-- usually from 40 minutes to two
hours a night.

On this particular day, Gerasina had a dentist appointment and
rushed off right after classes. Like many of Moscow's government
schools, School 469 is overcrowded and, as a result, operates on two
shifts; Gerasina works the first.

Gerasina and I had agreed to meet again the following day, after she
finished her classes. As I waited in the hall outside her classroom,
Kolnovalova, the principal, came to tell me that Gerasina had been
unexpectedly called away. Later, I learned that she had been summoned
to a ceremony, where she received the "Excellence in Public Education''
award, in recognition for her work. I had to laugh: I had taken pains
to ask the principal to introduce me to an average, ordinary teacher,
and she, of course, led me to her best, one who'd been nominated for
one of the highest honors in Russian education.

The next day, Gerasina told me that she had been so surprised by the
news that she'd had to run home to change into a more suitable outfit
in which to receive her award. "I knew I was a candidate for this,''
she explained, "but I didn't know I would be receiving it.'' The honor
was particularly sweet, she said, because her mother, also a teacher of
Russian language and literature, had received the same award before she
retired. When I asked how important it was to her to be honored in such
a way, she brushed off the question, saying she cared more about what
her students thought of her. "Generally, for teachers, especially those
with my amount of years working, the best awards are the respect and
love of our students,'' she said.

Before taking her current post, Gerasina taught for seven years at
School 269. In her first year at that school, she taught a class of 5th
graders and then continued to teach them from grade to grade until they
finished their final year of school. "I can't even describe how close
we were,'' she said. At a particularly difficult period in her life,
when her cousin was dying of cancer, these former students stood for
hours in then-omnipresent Soviet food lines to buy milk, eggs, and
bread for her. "Since then, I've considered them family; they come back
and ask how I am, and I tell them I miss them,'' she said, leafing
through an album in which she has pasted pictures of her former
students and poems, letters, and cards they have written to her. "When
something good happens in their lives, they call me to tell me about
it; when they've had an academic success, they tell me. They're my
children.

"The most important thing to a teacher is her students and the
relation between the teacher and the student. Work is hard. Classes are
large. Without a warm atmosphere, it would be awful.''

I asked Gerasina about her students' ambitions. The 800 youngsters
who attend School 469 live in a decidedly working-class neighborhood in
southeast Moscow, where their parents are laborers, service people, and
civil servants. "Now, it's very hard to imagine what they will be,''
she replied, pushing a strand of black hair from her face. "Parents
still dream about their children going to college; for a long time, our
society cultivated in us a desire to get a higher education. It's
prestigious; it gives you the feeling that you can achieve
personally.'' Seventy percent to 80 percent of her 11th graders still
go to institutes of higher education, she said, "despite the fact that
now, with these hard times, you can get a diploma and not have any idea
of where you will work.''

In the past, many graduates of School 469 pursued careers in law,
journalism, even teaching. But Gerasina has noticed a shift in career
choices. "If before it was very prestigious to study engineering in
college,'' she said, "now you have more success with other sorts of
fields,'' such as business, trade, economics, and construction--fields
in which there is money to be made in Russia's changing economy.

As I observed the children in Gerasina's classroom, I couldn't help
but wonder how they were coping with their country's growing freedoms
and hardships. Kolnovalova had told me that almost half of the school's
students live in single-parent homes or with one or both
grandparents.

"The atmosphere in families has become more difficult,'' Gerasina
said. "There are very few parents who are very well-off. Even if they
are well-educated, they still have to count their money all the time,
which we never did in the past. Even if parents earn a lot, they are
often highly stressed or very tired, and children notice, especially
the older ones.''

What's more, Gerasina said she believes that life for children
outside the school is not as full as it was when she was a child. "They
abolished the Consomol and the pioneer organizations,'' she said,
referring to the former Communist Party youth groups, "and didn't give
children anything in their place.''

Gerasina looked out the window, where a strong wind was blowing the
last leaves off the trees. "School is important in society,'' she said,
"especially given what's happening now in our country. We have to
prepare students with values for this new world.'' She admitted that
she was worried, "as a mother and a teacher,'' about her children and
her students. "Our life has changed so much.''

She paused for a moment before going on: "To be free is very
important, but we're not used to this. It would be funny if I said we
were so happy because they gave us the freedom to read banned writers
when it's unclear what these changes have brought to us. There are
still so many problems. The first years of perestroika, we felt such
happiness, such joy, especially among the intelligentsia. The world
looked to us. We read a lot, got to know many writers, talked a lot. I
went to demonstrations with other members of the intelligentsia. It was
wonderful. We understood each other; we had rich discussions.''

Again she paused. When she continued, her eyes were downcast. "Now,
we've all started counting money; financial problems are always on our
minds. We're all tired of just surviving, of suffering. Russia is in a
painful state. I'm not sure what we have now is democracy. Democracy,
as I see it, is each individual doing his best. I think we have just
the opposite now--anarchy.''

The following morning at my local bread store, the women and men
around me complained bitterly about inflation and the removal of
government food subsidies as they bought their brown bread. A loaf of
bread that cost four rubles a year ago had skyrocketed to 160
rubles.

At School 469, however, attention was directed to happier matters.
Although Russia has abolished a number of the holidays celebrated under
the former Communist government, Teachers' Day--Oct. 1--is still
observed, and as I entered the building, students were busy making
last-minute preparations for an afternoon concert in honor of their
instructors.

Meanwhile, upstairs, in her classroom, Gerasina and I resumed our
ongoing conversation. I asked her what characteristics one needed to be
a teacher, and she responded with a description that sounded pretty
universal. "I always say, you have to love children,'' she replied. "If
a teacher is indifferent to the class, the class won't work. And then,
you have to give a lot of thought to how to develop children's respect
for you. First of all, you have to be professional, to have knowledge
of the subject and then impart it to the students so that they know how
much you have to give them. Second, you have to act so that the
students see how much knowledge you want to give them. If they feel
that you want to give them knowledge that you yourself have, then they
also will want to learn. Teachers cannot be indifferent. There are
teachers who come to class and simply sit at ease for 40 minutes;
students should always know that the teacher, in that 40 minutes, is
trying very hard to teach them. This isn't for everyone because it's
hard to work in this kind of constant physical tension. Children always
feel when you want to teach them.''

But if Gerasina's comments sounded like those of any good
traditional teacher, her belief that teachers need to possess an
internal spirituality was typically Russian. "If you don't like your
work, each day is the same,'' she said. "Very often people say, 'How do
you work in school? Isn't it scary or intimidating?' I think that you
have to find something internally for yourself--to discover your
place.''

I wanted to know how Gerasina had developed her teaching style. She
said she attended teachertraining seminars led by experienced teachers,
read books on teaching, watched teaching programs on television, and
tried to keep abreast of the latest developments. "In general, I'm
interested in everything that relates to my profession,'' she told me.
"If there's something new, some new method, I always try to find out
about it.''

Just then, four 8th grade girls tiptoed into the classroom with
flowers, a Teachers' Day gift. A few minutes later, three boys barged
into the room with a box of chocolate. "It helps to know that they
appreciate my attempts to impart knowledge to them,'' Gerasina told me
proudly, as we walked downstairs to the concert.

The teachers--most of them women--sat together in five rows of seats
directly opposite a makeshift stage. We took seats among them. Ten
elementary school students started things off with a poem. When one boy
forgot a word, a half-dozen teachers rushed to fill in for him; the
student blushed. Hardy applause followed the act. Next, seven costumed
8th graders read a humorous decree they'd written honoring their
teachers, including Gerasina. Then two 5th grade girls in long dresses
and scarves danced and sang, repeating the chorus: "I love my teacher
very much, and I will never forget her after school ends.'' The
children had prepared for the concert outside of class, with help from
the school librarian, and had taken great pains to keep its contents
secret from their teachers.

The event continued with plays, gymnastics, piano playing, and
singing. Between acts, a trio of seniors handed the teachers
certificates and chocolate coins. Special attention went to one teacher
who has taught at School 469 for 30 years; she received bouquets of
flowers, bottles of champagne, and hugs from her students.

The final acts of the concert featured students who had already
graduated from School 469--one group in 1989, another last year.
Looking very grown up in suits and dresses, they sang and played guitar
in appreciation of their former teachers. Gerasina's seniors from last
year gave her two bouquets of flowers.

I was scheduled to meet Gerasina the following Monday--Oct. 4--at
1:30 in the afternoon. When the day arrived, Moscow was in a state of
upheaval, caught in fierce street fighting. The pro-democracy forces of
Boris Yeltsin had begun a 10-hour assault on the Russian White House,
leaving dozens dead, hundreds injured, and the Parliament building
ablaze. Their actions came one day after hard-line demonstrators
stormed the office of Moscow's mayor and occupied the Ostankino
television station, putting all but one of the city's TV stations off
the air for several hours. In the wee hours of Oct. 4, a column of
armor had passed two blocks from School 469 on its way toward the
center of the city. That morning, in Moscow's Proletariat region,
children went to school as usual.

I walked to School 469 at 1:30 and found Gerasina in her classroom,
a handful of students milling about, the television--volume low--tuned
to the shelling of the Parliament. She looked tired. Her first words
were about the events of the day. "This is unbeliev- able, uncivilized;
these things go on in Abkhazia, but not in Moscow,'' she said,
referring to a war-torn region in the former Soviet republic of
Georgia.

But she was clearly most worried about her husband, Alexander
Borisovich. The couple, together with their son, Geril, and Alla, the
daughter of the cousin who had died of cancer, live in a three-room
apartment not far from the school. Alexander had heeded then-First
Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar's call the previous night to support
Yeltsin at a rally downtown, and he hadn't returned home. Geril had
wanted to join his father, but Gerasina had prevented him from doing
so. All she wanted to do now was find her husband and get some sleep.
We agreed to meet again when some calm had returned to Moscow.

By 5 p.m., Vice President Alexander Rutskoi and Parliament Speaker
Ruslan Khasbulatov, the leaders of the hard-line insurgents, had
surrendered and were taken from the Russian White House to Lefortovo
Prison, not far from School 469. Yeltsin imposed an 11 p.m. to 5 a.m.
curfew in Moscow that was to last two weeks.

Gerasina and I met three days later at the school. I asked first
about her husband. She reassured me that he had come home unharmed.
Normal life had returned to most of Moscow, though snipers roamed the
city center at night, and the White House--now dubbed the Black
House--still smoldered. In a frightening move reminiscent of an earlier
era, government censors restricted what was published in Russia's main
newspapers. But in a sharp break from the past, the ceremonial honor
guard at Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square marched for the last time.

Dressed in a pale blue two-piece outfit, Gerasina spoke in a low
voice of the recent events in the capital. There were tears in her
eyes. "I think these were tragic days in the history of our
government's development of democracy,'' she said. "And like any normal
person, I think it was a very painful experience. Because if after the
August coup of 1991, there was a sort of joy, then now, there is no
such feeling. Since then, the process has been very difficult, very
painful, and it would be frightening if it were repeated. It's possible
there will be a repeat--if not in our city, then in some other
city.''

She paused before going on. "For the first time, I understood how
very difficult it is to be in the president's shoes. To make such a
decision [to storm the White House] is very painful because it's the
nation's house and his. I understand very well what he is doing. And
maybe, for the first time, I even recognize how strong a person he is.
It's very hard to take such responsibility upon yourself.''

Gerasina continued, her eyes glancing around the classroom where
she'd taught for the past decade: "I always thought that Moscow was an
intelligent city. I am just amazed at the fact that on television they
showed that when Rutskoi took the microphone at the White House, among
those who came around to support him were fascists with swastikas. I
can't forgive Rutskoi for this. We've never experienced civil war so
acutely.... We never thought that this could happen in Russia.''

Though our minds were on the political developments outside of Room
28, Gerasina and I turned our attention once again to education, this
time to a very sensitive topic for Russian teachers--that of pay. An
Education Ministry official I'd spoken with had told me that school
funding, especially as it relates to teachers' salaries, tops the list
of educators' concerns. A shrinking federal budget, she said, only
makes matters worse, especially in regions of the country where local
authorities can't afford to levy taxes to supplement teachers' wages.
The problem is compounded by inflation, which averaged 25 percent a
month last year.

Education reform has recently linked teacher pay to such factors as
years of service, teaching load, and extracurricular activities.
Gerasina's 20 years of experience puts her at the top of the
professional ladder in that category, and she works long hours and
takes on extra duties to boost her pay even more. In September, Moscow
teachers--following a demonstration over low wages--received a 30
percent salary hike from the City Council. With all this factored in,
Gerasina's salary at the beginning of the school year was 160,000
rubles a month, then the equivalent of $135. Not very much, I thought,
for an experienced teacher working many hours of overtime. But, then,
$135 is considered a good salary in Russia, where the average national
wage at the start of the school year was the equivalent of $65 a month,
and the average salary for Russia's 1.3 million teachers was $50 a
month, with starting teacher pay as low as $25.

Gerasina acknowledged that her salary is high by Russian standards
and seemed to feel the need to justify it. "My work is very important,
and it's very physically demanding,'' she said. "Besides, prices are
horrific; this is why I work so many extra hours. And I still have two
children who don't bring home paychecks--just the opposite. My son's
college stipend is completely inadequate, even though he doesn't drink
or smoke. It's just not enough for him.''

Gerasina's husband recently quit his low-paying job as an electrical
engineer to start a commercial firm that buys and sells electronic
equipment. He makes about $85 a month. The couple's combined income,
then, pays for rent, electricity, television service, clothing, food,
tuition for Geril, and other assorted expenses. Gerasina was quick to
point out that her family doesn't live in luxury. "We never go to
restaurants anymore,'' and there is little money for travel, she told
me. This past summer, however, they splurged. They celebrated their
20th anniversary at a resort in the now-independent country of Latvia,
the farthest Gerasina has been from Moscow-- although she dreams of
someday seeing the capitals of Europe. The couple spends summer
weekends nailing boards into a dacha they're building on the outskirts
of Moscow. And for entertainment, they read and watch television;
Gerasina is especially fond of the dubbed U.S. soap opera Santa
Barbara, which is very popular in Russia.

I asked Gerasina how Russia's economic woes have affected education.
Without hesitation, she told me, "Teachers have left the profession.''
In fact, 20 percent of the teachers at her school have recently quit to
take better-paying jobs. That number mirrors national figures,
according to the Education Ministry, although the number is more like
40 percent in big cities. Most of those who leave the profession speak
English or another foreign language or are young and cannot make ends
meet on a beginning teacher's salary. Many seek jobs with commercial
firms, which pay 10 times as much as the schools.

Still, students continue to enter the various pedagogical
institutions, but fewer of their graduates are choosing to teach. "It's
no longer clear where graduates will work after they've completed
higher education,'' Gerasina says. "Very many graduates don't work in
their fields of specialization because all these areas of
specialization have very low salaries. We still try to convince kids
that education is important, for personal development, for the
development of a responsible government, for the future. But there is a
very bad situation in education, and it will continue due to
inertia.''

Kolnovalova, Gerasina's principal, agreed. "As an administrator, I
simply don't see any improvement of teachers' material situation,'' she
said. In an attempt to raise the salaries of her teachers, Kolnovalova,
like many school principals, is trying to rent out what little space is
available in the school to businesses. "On the one hand, I'm against
this,'' she said. "But on the other hand, I have to try it.''

Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, once described teaching as "one of
the most important and most rewarding professions, the role and
significance of which will never stop growing.'' But the cachet of
being a teacher in Russia today has declined significantly, due to
economic hardships as well as the incredible social changes that have
catapulted teachers into roles they are not accustomed to. "For all
teachers, it's a tense time,'' Gerasina said.

But then, speaking with a hope for the future that is decidedly
Russian, she added: "We don't know what will happen politically, but
regardless of what is happening outside, education always
continues.''

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